Iran’s humiliating military setbacks during the twelve-day war, compounded by deepening economic strain under the renewed maximum-pressure campaign, have forced an internal reckoning in Tehran over the country’s domestic social contract and its regional posture. The debate is no longer confined to how Iran should absorb external pressure, but whether the political and economic foundations of its “forward defense” doctrine remain viable. After the war, reformist factions moved quickly to shape the narratives around this discussion. Former president Hassan Rouhani and his allies called for a calibrated turn at home and abroad – a politico-economic opening to shore up domestic legitimacy alongside pragmatic engagement with the West to relieve external pressures. The hardline response was swift and revealing. Tasnim, a news agency closely linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, dismissed such proposals as Iran’s “Gorbachev moment,” warning that reformist demands for openness and détente risked replaying the Soviet Union’s fatal experiment with political liberalization and engagement with the West.

The analogy was not new, but it gained renewed salience after President Pezeshkian’s election in 2024. In July 2024, the reformist daily Arman-e Emrooz published an article titled “Iran’s Gorbachev Manifesto”, portraying Pezeshkian’s reformist promises as an Iranian analogue to glasnost and perestroika. In a response article a day later, Kayhan, an influential daily linked to the Supreme Leader’s office, cautioned the new administration against embarking on the Gorbachev path of negotiations with the West, a trajectory it argued had led not to renewal, but to state collapse, economic degradation, and strategic humiliation.

Accordingly, unlike Moscow’s late-Cold War acquiescence to American military superiority, Tehran should not abandon its core deterrence assets, including any limitation on its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Nor, the hardline camp warned, should Iran relinquish the forward defense it has built in its neighborhood through support for the so-called Axis of Resistance, a retreat they likened to the Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe.

Accepting the geopolitical losses of the past two years, the Iranian establishment, now more tightly coordinated around a Larijani-led SNSC, has opted for strategic restraint abroad while quietly rebuilding power at home. Rather than attempting to reverse setbacks through escalation, Tehran appears content to bide its time and strengthen its conventional capabilities. Though an imperfect analogy, the approach resembles the cautious balancing strategy pursued by Yevgeny Primakov’s Russia in the late 1990s. This recalibration rests on three pillars. First, Iran is deepening ties with non-Western powers to offset Western pressure and advance what it sees as a genuinely multipolar order, one that respects the claims of regional powers to spheres of influence. Coordination with Russia and China has become central to this effort. Since June, Beijing has played a crucial role in mitigating the impact of Washington’s tightening pressure on Iran’s oil exports. Meanwhile, new energy and connectivity projects with Russia aim to reduce Tehran’s regional isolation, although bilateral trade still falls short of declared ambitions. On the military front, Iran is advancing talks with Moscow on acquiring MiG-29s and Su-35s and seeking air-defense systems and radar technologies from China, signaling a renewed focus on conventional deterrence.

Second, Tehran is moving to harden its domestic political and security institutions against a new wave of security crises. The appointment of a bridging figure such as Ali Larijani to a senior coordinating role within the Supreme National Security Council, alongside the creation of new defense-related bodies, reflects an effort to address long-standing problems of institutional coordination and mobilization. Politically, despite limited openings created by wartime pressures, the leadership around Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has sought to consolidate authority by mobilizing nationalist narratives and constraining the opposition’s access to political space.

Militarily, Iran is expanding its ballistic missile arsenal, which – judging from the lessons drawn from the twelve-day war – it views as the most effective tool for imposing costs on Israel. In December, Netanyahu publicly suggested that Iran’s growing missile capabilities posed a more immediate concern than its nuclear enrichment.

Third, Iran is seeking to normalize relations with its immediate neighbors to blunt the risk of Israeli encirclement, while simultaneously preserving leverage through its regional partners. Tehran continues to rely on its network of proxies, most notably in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen, as instruments of power projection, or at a minimum as mechanisms to raise the costs of a potential Israeli attack. Here, restraint does not imply retreat, but rather a recalibration of how and where Iran chooses to compete.

Shattered Axis?

The twelve-day war exposed the fragilities embedded in Iran’s long-standing forward defense doctrine, which rests on the premise that coordinated pressure by the so-called Axis of Resistance can deter Israeli aggression and prevent the nightmare scenario Tehran has sought to avoid since the Iran–Iraq war: direct attacks on Iranian territory. Yet, contrary to the expectations of some observers, Axis forces, including Hezbollah, Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, and the Houthis, did not enter the fight alongside Iran in June. Since the summer of 2024, the Israeli strikes, especially against Hezbollah, degraded their operational capacity and constrained their room for maneuver. But local political calculations also weighed heavily. Resistance leaders judged that the costs of escalation on Iran’s behalf would outweigh the benefits, particularly as Tehran itself appeared reluctant to invite broader U.S. involvement by drawing its partners directly into the conflict.

Since June, pressure on Axis forces has intensified, raising the prospect of demilitarization that would significantly erode Iran’s strategic depth. Yet the most important setback has so far been the loss of vital access to Hezbollah through Syrian territory after the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024. In December 2025, Syrian security forces reported foiling a weapons-smuggling operation near the Lebanese border allegedly involving transfers from Iran to Hezbollah, while tighter Lebanese border controls have made it harder to move arms across the porous Syria–Lebanon border. Israeli operations against Iranian generals overseeing arms transfer and weapon depots added further pressure. The pivot to air and maritime routes brought its own limits. Israel adapted to the change, while Lebanon’s government gradually expanded oversight of Beirut international airport, weakening Hezbollah’s long-standing grip. The Lebanese authorities have also confiscated a part of Hezbollah’s weapons and dismantled tunnels south of the Litani River. Meanwhile, targeted sanctions on Axis-linked financial institutions such as Hezbollah’s Qard al-Hassan and PMF-affiliated entities like Muhandis General Company may raise the costs of rebuilding military and social networks in the near term. Taken together, these pressures have revived a broader debate inside Iran over whether continued financial and material support to regional proxies remains justified, particularly when those forces proved unable or unwilling to defend Iran directly, even as the Iranian economy strains under mounting economic pressures.

In this context, the twelve-day war unleashed two interrelated dynamics that may ultimately ease Iran’s efforts to reconstitute the Axis of Resistance. First, the scale and visibility of the damage inflicted on Iran reshaped public attitude toward forward defense. Among ordinary Iranians, many of whom had long questioned the value of financing distant proxies, the war reinforced the logic that engagement beyond Iran’s borders, however costly, may be necessary to prevent future conflicts from spilling over to Iranian soil.

Indeed, even if the Axis forces did not fight alongside Iran, they arguably fulfilled a core function by absorbing pressure and buying Tehran time before Israeli operations reached Iran’s borders. Yet, as the immediate shock of the war recedes and economic pressures intensify, the Iranian leadership may struggle to garner meaningful domestic support on this front. 

Second, Israel’s growing regional assertiveness has intensified threat perceptions across the region, generating bottom-up demand for renewed resistance against what many actors increasingly view as unchecked Israeli power, the very logic on which the Axis was originally built. The lack of viable political and economic integration for Shiite communities in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria risks sustaining transnational ideological currents long advanced by Tehran. In the last few months, Iran has sought to capitalize on this moment by reaching out to former adversaries in an effort to balance Israeli dominance. In September, during a visit to Saudi Arabia, Ali Larijani reportedly conveyed Hezbollah’s appeal to Riyadh to turn the page on past disputes and explore the possibility of a broader, if informal, front aimed at containing Israel.

Adaptation

Although the latest geopolitical shifts have disrupted Iran’s traditional logistical links with Axis forces, Tehran has moved quickly to adapt rather than retreat. In Syria, even as it can no longer operate with the freedom it enjoyed under Bashar al-Assad, Iran continues to rely on long-established smuggling corridors to supply Hezbollah. This persistence reflects less Iranian strength than Syrian weakness. The new authorities in Damascus have yet to consolidate effective control over large swaths of the country, while Hezbollah maintains dense ties with local tribal and commercial networks that facilitate coordination and transit across Syrian territory. The Israeli and American strikes have degraded but not eliminated the connective tissue linking Iran to its most important partner.

At the same time, Tehran appears to be exploring a more coordinated, diplomatic re-entry into the Syrian theater alongside key regional actors, most notably Russia and Türkiye. Putin’s reception of Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa, followed closely by Larijani’s meetings with Putin and Moscow’s Middle East envoy Mikhail Lavrentiev in October, fueled speculation that Russia might mediate a gradual Iran-Syria normalization after relations hit a nadir in December 2024. Parallel signals emerged from Ankara. Hezbollah officials attended a Palestine-focused conference in Türkiye, and multiple reports pointed to Turkish efforts to mediate between Hezbollah and the Syrian government. Ankara is highly invested in cementing the status quo in Syria, while Iran is desperate to establish a tactical common front to check further Israeli expansion.

While any normalization would fall short of restoring Syria as an open logistical hub, a clear red line for Damascus, it could still help Tehran counter Israel’s expanding military and diplomatic reach by embedding Iran’s Syria policy within a broader, regionally coordinated framework.

Financial adaptation has been even more pronounced. As access through Syria narrowed, Iran shifted monetary support to safer, more opaque channels. In November, the U.S. Treasury Department stated that Iran’s Quds Force had transferred more than $1 billion through networks centered on money-exchange companies in the United Arab Emirates and Türkiye. A WSJ investigation covered how Tehran-linked exchange houses, private firms, businessmen, and couriers moved funds to Lebanon via the Hawala mechanism, a centuries-old trust-based system designed to evade formal oversight. Beyond Iranian support, Axis actors, especially Hezbollah, have increasingly relied on cryptocurrencies, gold swaps, and semi-legal commercial activities across Africa and the Gulf to sustain their military and social infrastructures under tightening sanctions pressure.

These logistical and financial adjustments have been accompanied by a subtler but no less significant shift in Iran’s political approach to the Axis. While Tehran has played a weak hand skillfully to preserve influence, the earlier asymmetry is gone. Iran is no longer in the driver’s seat. Its partners have become more autonomous, with coordination increasingly contingent on local priorities and rapidly shifting regional realities rather than centralized direction. This looser arrangement offers Tehran some relief, allowing it to limit the costs of external balancing at a time of mounting domestic economic strain. Yet it also carries risks. Reduced leverage over allied forces could leave Tehran poorly positioned in an eventual, and increasingly unavoidable, war with Israel. Adaptation, in other words, has preserved the Axis, but at the price of greater uncertainty over how, and whether, it can be wielded when it matters most.